Today, with the explosion of mobile phones and their built-in cameras, images of everything are everywhere — from the banal to the dramatic and historic.
Through satellite technology and tools with 3D capabilities there is almost no place on Earth that hasn’t been pictured. We have become a bit jaded. Yawn…nothing is new.
So, what’s it like to see something you know from a different perspective, for the first time?
Rewind to before cell phones when cameras were a luxury and not always handy (and not always loaded with the right film as you will see below) — many seminal moments went undocumented. Before the dawn of the U.S space program there were no pictures of our world from a distance.
“Earthrise” and “The Blue Marble” were firsts and remain the archetypes.
Merry Christmas
“Good night. Good luck. Merry Christmas and God bless all of you on the good earth,” so signed off the crew of Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968 as they were approaching lunar sunrise.
It was the first manned mission to the moon and the crew — Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders —broadcasted a message back to Earth.
As they were orbiting and taking images of the moons surface, suddenly Earth appeared. Anders exclaimed: “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.”
In 2013, NASA released a simulation of the moments in that mission, based on the audio of the astronauts’ conversation, of what might have happened as the picture was being taken.
It’s been said that Earth was discovered that night. American nature photographer Galen Rowell has described this image as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”
Ernie Wright, project lead with the Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, said, "Earthrise had a profound impact on our attitudes toward our home planet, quickly becoming an icon of the environmental movement.”
image credit: NASA (Click for image for full size.)
On the final Apollo mission, astronauts captured the most classic view of Earth in what’s known as the “Blue Marble.”
The picture is quite different than Earthrise, providing the first full view of the Earth, but had a similar impact.
TIME Magazine described it as such.
“It was not the first jaw-dropping picture of Earth from outer space…But no other photograph ever made of planet Earth has ever felt at-once so momentous and somehow so manageable, so companionable, as ‘Blue Marble — the famous picture taken December 7, 1972, by the crew of Apollo 17 as they sped toward the moon on NASA’s last manned lunar mission.”
image credit: NASA (Click image for full size.)
According to NASA, it was the first time an Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the South polar ice cap. In fact, the ability for viewers to identify what they were looking at contributed to the picture’s longevity.
TIME Magazine explained:
“A large part of Blue Marble’s lasting appeal surely has something to do with the fact that the proportions and the features on display in the photo are so familiar. In a roughly square frame sits the almost perfectly round Earth, seen from a distance of about 28,000 miles. We not only see Africa: we recognize Africa. We recognize the Arabian Peninsula.”
Since this first image, others have been captured over the years in higher resolution, from different directions and at night, i.e the “Black Marble.”
This is the Blue Marble in 2015.
image credit: NASA (Click for image for full size.)
Recently, thousands of never been seen before images taken by Apollo astronauts were released. Mashable reported, "The Project Apollo Archive made a massive update to its Flickr account Sunday, adding a trove of more than 8,000 photos taken during moon missions from 1969 to 1972."
